


In Between

by Parragone



Category: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six (Video Games)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Dreaming, Gen, Kapkan's Mom, Memories, Serious Injuries, Try to say awake, everything will be okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:47:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23483323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Parragone/pseuds/Parragone
Summary: When you react a second too late, and the other end of that shotgun isn't a friend, you pay the price.
Relationships: Maxim "Kapkan" Basuda/Timur "Glaz" Glazkov
Comments: 3
Kudos: 44





	1. Stay Awake If You Can

Blood was something they were all used to. It stained their clothing, it rusted on the edges of their knives, it seeped into their dreams. It was simply a part of their lives, both their own blood and the blood of others.

It didn’t make this any easier.

Gustave held the coat against the wound, trying to hold pressure against Maxim’s steadily darkening clothing. There was gunfire nearby, Grace holding cover as Marius got the helicopter running. They didn’t have time to wait for a miracle; Taina had pulled her jacket and given it to the doctor to try and cover the entire injury. 

The mission was supposed to be easy. It was simple, in and out; they had brought Maxim because he was one of the strongest area controllers they had. It was a simple hostage extraction; Gustave had allowed Maxim to trap the doors as they made their way back through the house, giving them a little extra time. It was a standard tactic, something they had done a thousand times.

A thousand times didn’t save him from the one time. There was someone a little too close on the heels, and they had aimed a shotgun directly at Maxim. They had missed, likely due to the hunter’s reflexes being honed for high tension situations. They’d suffered the consequences of their actions, a knife embedded in their eye socket and leaving them, at best, incapacitated. Judging by the lack of breathing, Gustave assumed the less favorable outcome had come to be.

Shock was a hell of a drug, as it turned out. Maxim’s pace kept up with the group, long enough to reach the landing pad. It was Marius who realized Maxim had stopped responding once they had gotten the hostage inside, and it was Taina who saw the Russian operator collapse trying to pull himself into the helicopter. The rest was a blurry, terrified mess as Gustave and Taina took turns keeping the pressure down. 

By the time they were airborne, Maxim had lost enough blood to be too weak to hold his own pressure down. The combined efforts of Taina and Gustave to keep his wound under pressure was more than enough to keep him from slipping further down the slope. Grace had calmed the hostage down while the doctor and the interrogator got Maxim propped against the wall, and now was dialing someone on her phone. 

“What’s your name, Kapkan?”

“Maxim Basuda.”

“Where and when were you born?”

“Kovrov, Russia. Sixteen twenty-six in the afternoon, May fourteenth, nineteen seventy-nine.”

It was an accident when Maxim had slipped away again, jolting awake when Grace patted his cheek; he thought he had been speaking, he could have sworn he had heard himself respond to Gustave’s question of his current mission objective. He blinked at her, only realizing that her phone was at his ear when it touched his cheek. 

“I called Glaz,” she said. “Can you feel the phone?”

“Yes,” he replied, dazed. “Why Timur?”

“You are not responding well to Doc, I think you might do better with Russian,” she replied, tone gentle. “Stay awake, okay?”

She moved away, back to the hostage that clearly looked uncomfortable and afraid. Gustave was wrapping something around his waist, holding that jacket in place to stem the bleeding. He didn’t want to tell the doctor how cold his hands felt, instead opting to listen to the phone as the Bluetooth beep told him it had been disconnected. Familiar language washed over his ears, comforting him in the sound alone.

“Maxim? They told me you were hurt, that you had bullets in you.”

“Yes. It does not hurt anymore, I think. There is a lot of blood. I want to sleep, or to drink.”

There was a laugh, strained with worry. “You can have neither yet. Talk to me, Maxim, what happened?”

His vision flickered. He could hear Doc and Marius arguing in the doorway to the cockpit, something about flying faster. “I was setting a trap on a doorway as we passed. There was someone there that had avoided our sweep. They aimed, they missed. I lost my knife.”

“Again, Maxim?”

“Mhm.”

The voice of Timur wavered, hushing for a moment. He could hear Alexsandr in the background, and he slowly realized that they likely had Shuhrat and Lera with them. He sighed, his injury sending a lance through his midriff as he tried to take a deep breath. This hurt more than he thought it would.

“Timur?”

“Yes, Maxim? What is it?”

“Can you ask Sasha if it is supposed to be this cold?”

The silence that hung over them twisted his stomach, but he heard a murmur on the other side of the phone. There was a pause, before Timur’s voice returned, wavering with a forced strength. “He says it will be cold. The dark is normal, but do not let it take you. Stay awake as long as you can. Sleep will be tempting, but do not until you have permission.”

“Everything is cold, Timur. Like standing in the snow too long.”

“You have lost a lot of blood. It will feel cold.”

He paused, through dim eyes at his team; Grace and Gustave were preparing to disembark, and Taina was coming close to him. She knelt by his side, one hand touching the ruined coat and the other his shoulder. He hadn’t realized they were so close to landing. They hadn’t been so close to a base, had they?

He heard Timur, or he thought he did. The door opened, and Gustave got off the plane; Maxim vaguely recognized a gurney, but by the time he came out of his blink he was on it. The phone had been taken from his ear, and he could only vaguely recognize actual words from the doctor that had kept him alive. As much as he wanted to stay awake, his body felt colder than it should, and his vision was too hazy to figure out which silhouette was which. 

He wasn’t sure when he decided sleep was a good idea, but somewhere between the black and the smell of a hospital, he found it was too much to hold on.


	2. Dreaming of You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trying to find comfort in the cold can lead to some really comforting dreams when you're bleeding out on a surgeon's table.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm sorry if it feels disjointed but that was the aim, to make it feel like a disjointed dream that doesn't always have everything in order  
> but also here you go  
> i promise chapter 3 is happier

The touch of frost on the edge of the window was familiar. His brothers were having a snowball war just beyond the edge of the house, with the broken fence as a barrier between the territory. He pressed his hand against the glass, the cold biting his fingertips as he traced the window. The blanket over his midriff and legs was heavy, and he wasn’t sure if he was sitting up or not.

He heard his door open, his mother opening it as she carried a bowl of soup in one hand. Her hair was still put up in the same bun she wore when he was young, before she cut it so short that it barely covered the nape of her neck. Her smile was warm, her dress so long it brushed the floor as she walked. When she sat next to him on the bed, placing the bowl on his dresser, she touched his face; he could smell her cooking, her perfume, the faint cling of tobacco from his father’s hugs.

She spoke, but he didn’t hear; he was too focused on her face, something he hadn’t realized he missed. He could hear his younger brothers laughing outside, the intense hyena cackling of Vitaly against the deep roll of Pyotr. It smelled like home; like smoke and old furniture and the soap his mother used on every article of clothing they had. Her voice, though he couldn’t make out the words, was comforting; he felt tired, and her voice seemed like a good way to fall asleep.

He heard a crash outside the window and watched his mother’s expression turn from sweet to exasperated as she got up. He heard her clearly this time, the gentle reassurances she would be right back to check on him. She walked out of the door, holding her skirt up in one hand as she raised her voice for his brothers. The moment she was out of sight, he looked back to the window. They weren’t there anymore; none of it was.

This time, he got up; the window led out to an open training yard. It wasn’t a window, no - it was a door. He stumbled, trying to figure himself out; he remembered this, of course he did. The first time he met them, it was such a cold winter day that even Shuhrat had doubled up on his jacket. There they were; four men, one of which having been his commander at the time. Shuhrat in the foul mood he was in, though Maxim hadn’t known at the time; Alexsandr watching the sky with the same fascinated love for the snow as a child.

Timur.

Clean cut, crisp in his image, just like the day they had met. No fuzz around his edges, no static around his movement. He didn’t run, no, he kept his walking pace as he approached the scene. His commander fell away first, followed by the laughing, bickering images of Alexsandr and Shuhrat. The snow stopped falling, the crunch of fresh powder replacing his booted footsteps. The scene had changed again - deep in the forests, in the early hours of the morning, near the river they both claimed to love and hate. Timur in his full uniform, the face wrap pulled down to show his face.

He came to a stop, just within arm’s reach, and yet he hesitated to touch. He felt a twinge of pain in his abdomen, heard a beep of a monitor as he reached for Timur’s face. Gustave’s voice, foggy and intermittent; Taina responding, the voices of strangers. The taste of anesthesia. 

“I’m dreaming, aren’t I?” His voice wavered, hand trembling.

“No, моя любовь. You are dying.” Timur’s voice was soft, as sweet as he had always been behind closed doors. “Remember the blood? The phone?”

He lowered his hand, pausing. That’s right; he’d been shot. That twinge was likely the surgeons trying to remove buckshot from his insides. He hesitated, starting to open his mouth and stopping. He chose, instead, to move forward and embrace the Timur in front of him, not saying how afraid he was to die. He had sent dozens of men to God, he had seen carnage and devastated corpses, and yet here he was. Afraid to die.

“Being afraid is normal,” Timur said, voice still gentle, as though this were simply one of Maxim’s panic attacks. The strong embrace that was always returned felt both real and not, disorienting Maxim further. “You know it is.”

“I want to see you again. And Sasha and Shuhrat, Lera-” He stuttered to a stop. He didn’t know what else to say; this was all in his head, and this Timur wasn’t even real. He was just a part of his mind, comforting him in what could be his last moments. He was alone with only the Timur he knew, in a place only they would remember.

He looked up, around, at the trees and the boulders that marked the bank of the river. This was where they had first gone together, in an effort to figure out each other’s feelings under the pretense of a hunting trip. He could still remember the smell of gunpowder on Glaz’s hands, the confused blundering words neither of them could seem to come up with. They were younger then, still unsure and afraid of messing up.

He considered everything, briefly, before pulling away just enough to press his forehead against Timur’s and close his eyes. If this was the end, if this was where he would go, then he wanted to be with those he loved. Even if it was all a last ditch effort by his brain to make death less daunting and to ease the fear of death, he wanted this; and if he did wake, then he would have lost nothing by dreaming.

“Will I remember this when I wake?”

“God knows, Maxim.”

The warmth of his home was there again, the heat of a fireplace lit and the smell of hot coffee filling the air. He opened his eyes and Timur was still there, though now in a red sweater and black scarf. He could hear his mother and father laughing together, only broken by the beeping of a heartbeat monitor that was drowned out by his dreaming. He looked into Timur’s eyes, a thumb brushing under the scar on the sniper’s eye as he let himself go; however this ended, he felt safe here. Regardless of if he woke or not, he could stay until that outcome was decided.


	3. Waking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Relief is a wonderful thing.

It had been four days since Maxim had been saved. After one day, the Spetsnaz arrived, Lera pulled Gustave into a hug the moment she saw him to allow the French operator to finally let his emotions hit him. After two days, Alexsandr had asked if the hunter would wake up. 

Timur blinked the sleep from his eyes. He had fallen asleep beside Maxim's bed, hand holding onto the hunter's in an effort to be woken if he stirred. The room was quiet beyond the soft beeps of the monitor, dim even with the colored lights of the vital reader overhead. He had started to get up and move, hand slipping slightly from Maxim's, when he felt the fingers tense in a vain attempt to make him stay. 

He stopped still, yes going wide as he took a sharp breath. It could be Maxim's instincts again, acting when he himself wasn't conscious. The sniper held back the hope, swallowing his heart back into his chest as he slowly turned his head. Blue eyes looked back at him, barely opened, barely awake; Maxim's expression was exhausted, confused, but he was awake. 

"Maxim?" Timur asked, tentatively hopeful.

"Timur," the hunter replied, clearly trying to speak as normal and yet barely above a whisper. "What time is it?" 

The sniper was caught between two reactions, and found himself using both. He laughed, a sound of mixed relief and actual amusement as he let the tears fall. The hunter's grip was weak, but tightened gently on Timur's fingers; he used both of his hands to lift Maxim's hand to his lips as he sat back down and smiled into the skin with a weak chuckle. 

" _ What? _ You sleep for four days after being shot and your first question is what  _ time _ it is? 

"I cannot read a clock in my dreams," Maxim replied with a slow smile. "Humour me?" 

Timur shook his head, removing one of his hands to pull out his phone. He tapped the screen awake, opening the clock so Maxim could see it. It read 03:51, something he could hear the hunter read off in a mumble, and Timur felt a wave of relief when he heard it. Maxim was awake. 

He couldn’t put to words what was going through his head, nor his heart. His hands felt like the static he so often heard over the radio, his chest felt too tight to breathe as he looked at the details of his partner’s face by the light of the phone; every cease and scar that was usually hidden beneath paint and dirt looked fresh, the rough stubble from days of not shaving only making his exhaustion more pronounced. He’d been fighting for his life, of course he was tired.

“Timur?”

“Yes, Maxim?”

“я тебя люблю.”

Timur hesitated for a moment, putting the phone face down to hide the light. He reached with the now free hand, placing his palm on Maxim’s cheek as if to be sure. The hunter, tired as he was, lifted a hand to place over Timur’s. Maybe in the morning, things would be hectic and they would be separated by doctors and concerned teammates, but that was morning and this was now. In silence, the sniper moved closer to the head of the bed to press his lips to Maxim’s forehead; the emotion that he felt couldn’t be put to words, but this was enough. The feeling of his partner holding as tightly as he could to his hands was enough.

He almost jumped out of his own skin when he heard the door open slowly, pulling away and yet holding tightly to Maxim’s hands as he looked to the one who’d entered. It was two, now that he saw; Gustave and Lera. He felt like a deer in headlights as the doctors came inside, relaxing only when Lera gave him a smile and a nod. 

“Relax, Glazkov. I know already. Now let me see Basuda,” Lera said, tone gentle as Gustave turned on the light. She came close as Timur sat down and released the hand on the opposite side of the bed for Lera to take. He personally let his head fall again, holding Maxim’s hand with both of his own as he listened to Gustave and Lera talk to each other and ask Maxim questions Timur was too exhausted to properly understand.    
  
Sleep was easier than the intermittent flickers in and out, now that he knew Maxim would be there when he woke.

\----

Three weeks had passed. Maxim had been allowed to come back to the main base, but he was restricted to bedrest and had to have assistance moving; Maxim insisted he was fine, he could walk, but Gustave had threatened to cuff him to the hospital bed and leave him there until he was fully healed if he didn’t listen to the doctors. It wasn’t his ideal, but being stuck in a wheelchair to reduce strain was better than being sent home or chained to the bed where he couldn’t do anything.

As it stood, Timur was sitting next to him in their room, sketching the hunter as they rested on the same bed. Maxim watched his partner’s pencil scribble one way and then another, the sniper’s eyes fixated on the page.

“Timur?”

“Yes, Maxim?”

“Thank you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> toots victory trumpet


End file.
